Personally I find it to be better than nothing. I'm rather tired of game descriptions that leave me no clue whatsoever what kind of game it is and whether or not I'll like it.

Do you guys find it sufficiently descriptive? Like you would need another sentence or two before getting excited about the game?

This is an individual preference/opinion. If a person really enjoys puzzle games or platformer games, he or she would automatically be slightly more interested that someone who isn't. It also would depend on how into the genre a person is interested. The extra sentence or two is needed to pull more than that niche group.

As for me, I would be interested in it, although the excitement may vary.

Do you guys find it sufficiently descriptive? Like you would need another sentence or two before getting excited about the game?

It's sufficient; it's a description of the primary genre and the mechanical elements that supplement it. It is a platforming game that incorporates puzzle elements in as much that a third person shooter is a shooter game played from a third person perspective. There's a panoply of sub-distinctions between each; you can append more adjectives if the game needs further distiinction from it's compatriots; Quake 3 is a competitive first person arena shooter - you probably know what I'm talking about, but context does not always demand the full distinction.

The individual mechanics of puzzle based platformers are not so easy to define into strict categories, but I'd argue that the majority of them are functionally similar from a high-level design perspective and that whilst the puzzle element may differ, it's purpose and objective as an element does not, and as such it does not actually require further definition. It's possible they may broaden of course - the concept of a 'First Person Shooter' genre didn't really emerge until well after Doom.

Well, if it's a 3D puzzle platformer RPG, that's one thing - Zelda, Okami, I like this kind of game. If it's a 2D puzzle platformer which is not an RPG, that would be more like Lemmings, World of Goo, and those similar games where you have distinct levels and hardly any story. Those are ok, not my favorite genre but they can be fun. If it's a horror-anything, I'm not playing it, because I don't like those. If it's a Sonic-type platformer I'm going to disagree with using "puzzle" as a descriptive term, and I'm not really interested in playing that kind of game. Or if it's something like Continuity, that's really more of a puzzle minigame in the same group as games like Sokobon; it just happens to be a platformer, but it could be basically the same game if something were substituted for the platforms.

I would refute a lot of these definitions, though I'm not familiar with all of these games. There are few Zelda games that are characterised by the player needing to traverse from platform to platform (Links Awakening as an example includes very small platforming sections), and there are no role playing elements in these games at all. 'Platforming' and 'Role Playing' are specific terminologies and they wouldn't really apply to these games. Specifically, Zelda is an archetypal action-adventure game which incorporates additional elements of puzzle solving. Lemmings and World of Goo I would also not classify as platformers, though this is certainly more debateable. As there is no challenge being given to an avatar to traverse a given environment (and a lack of direct control), I'd refer to them as puzzle games - more so World of Goo where there are no real elements I could associate with the platforming genre.

**So plain and simple, what's your gut reaction when you read puzzle/platformer in a description?**

It might be any kind of game, i 'd start looking for anything that might say something about the quality of the game.

I'd want some context - what constitutes the puzzle mechanics? A common archetype (perhaps the most obvious) includes physics based puzzles, but there are also mechanical, spatial or even more abstract logical and lateral thinking problems. You don't have to define it in such concrete terms with words like these (indeed, using it too much may well put off anyone but the most hardcore customer), but you should explain to the potential player what the objective is, what it is that presents the puzzle, and the means which the player has to solve it. An example would be Portal - the player must escape the laboratory through an series of increasingly elaborately designed environments by using the portal gun.